June 22, 2016

Bakuon!! -- Lime sempai

Let's get something clear from the get-go: I don't think the mangaka is trying to hide a serious story here. It's an ecchi comedy and that isn't going to change. But I do think there's a lot of story background here he's only revealing slowly. It's the skeleton onto which he's hanging a lot of good jokes and it's going to stay that way.

Nonetheless, I think it's there. And in particular I think there's something pretty interesting about Lime sempai. She's always been strange and mysterious, and I don't think that's random or haphazard. The mangaka knows the truth about her, and all the things that happen relating to her are consistent and driven by his unrevealed back story about her.

This is a monstrous spoiler about the whole series so it all goes below the fold.

May 20, 2016

Why are we watching?

(Yes, this post is about anime, so stick with me.)

May I introduce B.F. Skinner? He did critical work in understanding conditioning. Everyone has heard of Pavlov's Dogs, but that had to do with low level neural circuits and its practical application is extremely limited.

Not so Skinner's work. He was studying processes which happen at the highest levels of the brain. It's known as "operant conditioning" and it's extremely powerful. It has to do with reinforcement: the person who is training you is trying to achieve certain results, and he uses rewards to make you comply.

It's more complex than that, however. How does the operator get across what he wants the subject to do? You start by rewarding behavior which is close to what you want, and get more and more specific as time goes on.

You want the pigeon to peck the keyboard of a toy piano. So the first thing you do is to starve the pigeon so it's voraciously hungry. The pigeon wanders close to the piano, and you dump some food in a hopper which the pigeon immediately eats. But it wants more, so it wanders back to the piano and when it gets a lot closer, you reward it with more food. It goes like that; eventually you reward it when it puts its head near the keyboard, and you reward it for pecking the keyboard, and so on.

Quite complex behaviors can be induced this way. And they can be reinforced really very strongly. He also studied "schedules of reinforcement" and came up with some surprising results. "Continuous reinforcement" is what you use when first teaching the desired behavior but it isn't very effective at maintaining it.

The most effective schedule of reinforcement is to reward randomly, with varying amounts of reward. Small rewards more commonly, and bigger rewards more rarely. If the reward schedule is consistent, the subject knows each time whether there will be a reward. But if the schedule is random, then he thinks, "Well, maybe this time it'll hit."

Skinner's work was anticipated by tinkerers a hundred years before him, when they invented the slot machine. It turns out to be a nearly perfect device for teaching people to stick coins in the machine.

So what has this got to do with anime? Wonderduck asks, "Why are we watching?" when really excellent shows come around so rarely and unexpectedly?

The answer is that we've been conditioned. Smaller rewards more often (shows which are good but not great) and an occasional masterpiece without warning -- isn't that exactly like a slot machine?

Which makes us think, "Well, one more try; maybe this one will turn out to hit the jackpot!"

There are two major issues here. We can call the first one the "Sternum problem". It's about the way that shirts on girls are drawn so that the cloth follows the skin all the way into the middle of the cleavage:

That's not cloth; that's paint. (Or heat-shrink plastic, ouch!) No way anything woven would do that. Even worse is when they do this with plate mail, such as Cecily Cambell in "The Sacred Blacksmith":

The purpose of a chestplate like that is to distribute the force of a blow. But with that shape, if she gets hit all the force is going to be transferred to her sternum, and it will probably be crushed -- leading to all kinds of physical problems such as bleeding in her lungs.

Fairy Tail gets this right. Erza Scarlet wears a chestplate a lot of the time, but hers is not only plausible for manufacture, it's also plausible defense:

It doesn't try to form fit her breasts; it tries to spread the force of blows. Exactly right.

The other problem with a lot of this art we can call the "Hourglass problem", dealing with extreme ranges in the "three numbers".

How can there be such a difference in diameter between the level of the breasts and the level of the waist? If it is like most T-shirts it's going to be a constant cylinder and if it's wide enough to hold that chest, it's going to hang like a sack at the waist.

Fairy Tail usually gets this one right, too. Nearly all the women in Fairy Tail have huge boobs and narrow waists, but they usually wear halter-tops or, as in this case, clothing which is obviously custom tailored. There are plausible seams in this to expand the top part without being loose around the waist.

So these two girls have both problems:

This is a particularly egregious example. The cloth not only follows the cleavage exactly, it goes under the boobs as well. There's no way that's cloth; it's another paint job.

I discovered that show on a Sunday night through that episode, which wasn't a good thing. 'Cause after that, it was "Shit. Now I'm going to have to watch all of these, and I need to be at work at 0630."

Some of their builds are period accurate, but they produce an episode like every two weeks, so they will usually use modern equipment. I think the "Kill Bill" katana was as close to accurate as they could get it.

Posted by: CatCube at May 07, 2016 04:20 PM (fa4fh)

4
I am trying to remember where the link was posted - Ace of Spades or Hell in a Handbasket - to an interview with a craftsman who specialized in manufacturing medieval armor for movie and TV productions. The memory is a bit foggy, but his point was the balance between armor being able to protect the wearer and actually be wearable, would result in armor that was shaped the same for both men and women.

Posted by: cxt217 at May 07, 2016 08:59 PM (qfQs4)

5
Pretty close, of course. If it's a woman who is built like Erza, I think you'd want a bit more room in the chest, though.

6
I think you're underestimating the powers of modern elastic fabrics, which certainly are capable of hugging a 22" waist while accommodating a J cup (Or larger!) bust. There are fabrics out there that can stretch 400% or more, now.. I recall seeing some remarkable examples of this, even years ago.

You're right, of course, that even those fabrics won't just follow the contour of the breast like a coat of paint. Something they should remind comic book artists, too.

3
They're "guns", plural (as in, "welcome to the gun show" /flex). I've never heard of one upper arm referred to as a "gun", singular, though.

I suppose this lack of terminology comes from sports reporting? Most of the time when you hear about a part of a limb, it's in reference to some athlete who injured one. And for whatever reason, upper-arm injuries always get divided into "biceps" and "triceps" injuries.

And wikipedia says the anatomical term "arm" refers to the part from the shoulder to the elbow (I did not know that), so the technically-correct terms really are just "arm" and "forearm". Silly "common usage" getting in the way. The engineer in me does like the obvious choice of "aftarm", though...

Eh, Kuribayashi seems a little too much 'Don't think - fight." for me. Even Rory is not as impulsive as our wannabe harridan.

Episode 14 did feel very disjointed, like the scriptwriters had a bunch of scenes they wanted to include, but could never put them together into a smoothly flowing narrative. I have not read enough to the translations of the light novels but it felt like liberties were taken.

Posted by: cxt217 at January 15, 2016 09:05 PM (w2841)

2
Well, in this particular case she was following orders. But it can't be denied that she wanted those orders and enjoyed following them. (The manga makes that a lot more clear than the anime.)

She was given orders to "fire at will." The fact that she restrained herself and used non-lethal (but painful) methods until the Centurions got involved shows that she wasn't just acting impulsively in that scene.

4
I am actually referring to all the previous incidents with Kuribayashi. She gets a pass on this one given Itami ordered her and Tomita to take care of business.

Posted by: cxt217 at January 16, 2016 07:06 AM (w2841)

5
I think that
Noriko is a runaway. My guess is that she eloped with her boyfriend and they went off to live the Freeta lifestyle. Her parents were passing out flyers looking for her in Ginza because they thought she might be in that area. Well, Mom and Dad were right AGAIN, but never lived to know it because Ginza is a big place, the gate opened, she was abducted and they were killed. Her parents were killed because they were looking for her. This girl can't catch a break.

Oh boy....After taking look, it appears that the anime is largely faithful to the original plotline of the light novels, in the sequencing of events and by content. Which means the inconsistency and issues were by the original author.

There's two things that bother me about Kuribayashi fighting hand-to-hand (All of the times she's been doing it throughout the series):

1) She's doing it as a part-timer against forces who don't do it any other way. The Empire forces will spend all of their time training on hand-to-hand and sword/spear based combat, while she will only do it between training on more modern weapons and tactics. Plus, a rifle with a fixed bayonet is basically a spear, but will be deeply compromised vs. the regular spears the Empire forces carry. After all, her rifle is designed to be a rifle, not the handle of a bladed weapon.

2) She's hitting way above her weight class--literally. There's a reason that fighting sports are divided up into male and female and by weight. I have no doubt that she could whip a high plurality of people's asses with the element of surprise. However, they have her whipping everybody's ass in all fights.

I get why they do it for story reasons, and compared to the whole plot it's an easy suspension of disbelief, but it's still there.

I just finished watching the latest episode, and I'm glad the timeline with Noriko is bothering everybody else. I was trying to figure out what I missed.

Jim Dunnigan has written about how men (and, presumably women) deal with combat, and in particular how there are occasional people who thrive on it. It seems like it's their natural element. He says that the Vikings called men like that "Berserkers" and put them on the front line. More recently they have become known as "super soldiers". (That's what Dunnigan calls them, anyway.)

Some of our more famous American soldiers were apparently like that. I think he pointed out two in particular: Patton and Ridgway. This characteristic doesn't necessarily make a man a good General but it also doesn't disqualify him. (It can be a problem sometimes because these kinds of men don't really understand what combat does to normal men, and Patton did have a problem with that.)

It's clear to me that the author is presenting Kuribayashi as being a super-soldier. The author spent a long time in the JSDF and though it never saw real combat there would still have been combat exercises and war games and if he kept his eyes open he would have noticed the type.

And, it turns out, that even though they aren't physically any different than anyone else, they can be far more effective simply because they don't seem to have any fear.

Yeah, the Pretorians are well trained and well armed, but when they're charged by a woman who's five feet tall and screaming bloody murder, they would definitely be intimidated and would feel fear, which would put them on the defensive. I don't find it implausible at all that she could have that effect on them, especially when combined with unusual weapons (they had never seen a rifle with a bayonet before) and uniform and equipment and with the reputation that the JSDF has by that point after two major battles at Alnus and one at Italica.

Your examples are of people who were not physically hitting their enemies. Patton and Ridgway distinguished themselves as generals, where most of their work was intellectual and leadership. Here, we have somebody who's 5' nothing and maybe 120 lbs beating the hell out of all of the people. That would be a little off if she was merely fighting contemporary forces; here, she's beating the hell out of people whose only methods of warfare are arrows and beating the hell out of people. And rifle or no, I think they'd figure out pretty quickly that she's wielding a spear that has a reach of about half their own.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying there's an issue with Kuribayashi being the best soldier in the show. History has shown that a woman with a gun is easily a match for a man with a gun (or without one). I question her being the best hand-to-hand combatant. I should note that her being female has very little to do with this; I'd find it as much of a suspension of disbelief thing if it was a male JSDF, as the Empire has every incentive to maximize their skill at close in, hand-to-hand combat, where the JSDF only does it if things spiral out of control.

I picked Fairy Tail back up after getting caught up on Gate, and it occurred to me that I never even thought twice about Erza being one of the heaviest hitters. However, that show starts with the premise that all of the fighting is fantastic (in the fantasy sense), so it fits with everything else. Gate spends a lot of time having accurate weapons, etc., so when they do something fantastic like having the best hand-to-had combatant be one of the smaller people, it stands out more.

I don't know that you could say that she's the best warrior in the show (even leaving out Rory). But shock, it's a real thing, y'know? Kuribayashi wouldn't win in a gladiatorial arena, but most of the fights we've seen have been situations where she wasn't expected (or where the other guys were already really unsettled by events), and she's racked up a tally that's flattering her skill somewhat. Guts and no hesitation really can do that in real life, though.

14
A "half-reach" spear can be an advantage in close-quarters individual combat (or small-unit combat); ask the Zulus. Long spears are for throwing, or for large-unit formations (the European "pike hedge").

(Handwaving to follow.) And she's in a fantasy world. Dragons shouldn't be able to fly with their wing-to-weight ratio (with the size of some fantasy dragons, they shouldn't be able to breathe). They can fly simply because they're dragons; they're supposed to be able to fly. Maybe Kuribayashi wins because she's a true warrior and she's supposed to win? (In D&D terms, she has some fighter/monk levels, and many of her opponents are zero-level shlubs, trained or not.)

I don't know about that but after Italica Kuribayashi seems to have Rory's favor, and that may have practical aspects to it since Rory is the apostle of Emroy, the god of war, crime, madness, and death. (Sounds like a fun guy to have at a party, doesn't he?)

So Emroy may also smile on Kuribayashi, and that might not be trivial.

16
Pina's father impressed me in this episode, more than in any other. He was analyzing the situation in passionless detail and calmly concluded where his entire empire fit in against these enemies. This was his first time seeing them live and in combat.

I'm sure when Kuribayashi switched to live ammunition once the (sort of) Phalanx was formed, and he saw the easy defeat of one of his better defensive formations, that clinched the deal.

December 17, 2015

Are the first three movies (i.e. chap 1, chap 2, chap 3) now officially non-canon?

One of the new characters in the new movie (chap 7) is a former storm trooper who decided to change sides. He's black.

I thought all the storm troopers were clones of Jango Fett. Has that changed?

Or... we never actually saw the faces of Jango Fett or Boba Fett, not to mention any storm trooper. Are they all black? (Yikes! The SJW's will spike if so! Black slaves fighting and dying for the white emperor!)

2
Well, that's the canon explanation. But the stormtroopers were not originally clones. The clone thing didn't come along until, IIRC, a George Lucas interview between Star Wars and Empire. And it was never in a script until Attack of the Clones. The stormtroopers in Star Wars were normal, Imperial Academy recruits.

Oh, and the clones in the Clone Wars were originally the conceptual predecessor of the Mandalorians. The "Clones" were a race of cloned soldiers that were the sworn enemies of the Jedi-Bendu.

The term "Clone wars" appears in ep IV; Luke says "You fought in the Clone Wars?" to Ben Kenobi.

So Lucas had to come up with something to be the "clone wars" for the prequel. And what he came up with was pretty pitiful.

What I was hoping for was that the "clones" were ringers, duplicates of important people who replaced them to infiltrate the top levels of the government. The reason, then, that the Jedi were important was that they were the only ones who could tell who were clones and who were not. Or so I imagined it.

I think that would have made for a lot more interesting story than the one he ended up with IMHO.

5
I keep meaning to put together a t-shirt design for the slogan "Kurosawa Shot First!". What Lucas did with the prequels was prove that he's a terrible writer and director who still doesn't understand his accidental masterpiece.

6
The sad thing is that it's essentially true that the prequels are, except for Vader being a Skywalker, the story he intended to tell. He just didn't have anyone around to tell him he was doing a crap job anymore.
As to the original point, Abrams has sort-of kind-of hinted that he's mostly ignoring the prequels. However, they are still "officially" canon.

7
The canon, as mentioned is that Imperial Storm Trooper != Republic Clone Trooper. And, without going into spoilers, First Order Storm Trooper != Imperial Storm Trooper. But the background of the character and how he became a storm trooper is explicitly brought up in the movie and it makes as much sense as anything else in the universe.
I saw the movie last night. The first two thirds was amazing,and if the whole movie had been like that, it would undoubtedly place as the best movie in the franchise by far. Unfortunately the last third was ripe with refrigerator moments. It still blows eps 1-3 out of the water, but I'm not sure it will dethrone episode V as "the best".

So, nothing Zahn wrote, nor Anderson is canon? No Thrawn? No Pellaeon?
By this movie, I would think Han is too old to have twins plus one, so they're out?
No Mara Jade?

Pretty much. Disney dropped the Expanded Universe into the round container not long after they bought the franchise from George Lucas. So my Mara Jade action figure (For the longest time, among the most valued action figure released for Star Wars.) is no longer part of the franchise proper.

Posted by: cxt217 at December 18, 2015 06:49 PM (HFKy5)

11
Lucasfilm had this multi-tiered canon definition for a long time. It was basically A) What's in the movies B) What Lucas says or writes, until it's confirmed or contradicted by a movie, and C) licensed properties, until contradicted by B or A.

And as usual, Zahn has pretty strong evidence that Lucas did in fact originally intend the Thrawn trilogy to be chapters 7 - 9, just as Splinter of the Mind's Eye was originally Star Wars 2. When the Zahn books showed how much demand there was for Star Wars stories, the expanded universe was born. Although it's always had an asterisk next to the name.

November 08, 2015

A long time ago someone asked a philosopher a question, and his response was "That question is a meaningless noise." The point being it was a string of words which didn't make any sense.

A lot of science fiction double-talk is meaningless noise. I've run into a few lately. One was "temperatures below absolute zero". Temperature is a measure of the amount of randomized kinetic energy possessed by the atoms in a mass. If it's a gas, that resuts in pressure on the container. At Absolute Zero, there is no energy at all; the atoms stop moving and the pressure is zero. How can there be anything less than that? It would require negative energy which is another meaningless noise.

Another was "anti-graviton". Three of the four forces have now been united, the triumph of modern physics. The Electric Force, the Strong Force, and the Weak Force are all mediated by particles, respectively the photon, the gluon, and the weak vector bosun.

Physicists would really really like to make gravity fit into the same model, with a hypothesized "graviton" being the mediating particle. But in the only theory of gravity we have, General Relativity, gravity isn't actually a force. It's a side effect of non-Euclidian distortion of space time caused by the presence of mass.

In other words, there is no such thing as a graviton. Anyway, the mediating particles for the three forces don't have anti-particles, so even if there is such a thing as a graviton, why would it have one?

I myself made up one a long time ago: polarized sound. See, thing is, sound is a longitudinal wave, and you can't polarize longitudinal waves. (Light, by contrast, is a transverse wave and those polarize nicely.)

It ain't a term, but ice power (e.g. Gray in Fairy Tail) has always bothered me. Cold isn't a thing, it's the absence of a thing. To warm something up (Natsu) you add energy to it. All well and good. Making heat is not only completely acceptable, it's impossible to avoid at least some of that happening. (See the Second Law of Thermodynamics.) But freezing something means draining energy out of it. Where is that energy going?

The usual handwave is, "Well, it isn't our universe so our physical laws don't apply." Yeah, right. Or if not that, then "Shut up and look at the boobs, you nerd."

If you've got magic that facilitates the transfer of energy, then adding heat (generating fire) isn't fundamentally different from removing it (generating ice, though of course there's more to ice than just the cold). You're taking energy from one place (wherever the magic comes from?) and moving it to another place. It doesn't even necessarily have to violate the conservation of energy, though it's not like most magic in the show holds to that principle anyway.

It may even be easier to move the energy in that direction. Grey can make a LOT of ice and has very fine control over it; Natsu has plenty of oomph but still can generate fire only in limited ways.

2
Yeah, with most of the universe at a few degrees K above absolute zero, freezing things ought to be easier than heating them, if you can just create a link capable of transferring heat. Producing heat would require directing that link to someplace hot, which is much less of the mass of the universe, and a tiny, tiny fraction of the volume.
"and the weak vector bosun."
It's a naval force.

4
The ice magic sucks the energy into the same pool that fire magic draws from, of course. Humans might be net heat creators, but we're only good for 75 watts or so.

Now I'm imagining a story where the "good guys" and their deities have a secret, vested interest in letting the "bad guys" exist, because they need the users of death & destruction magic to keep the mana in balance, so they can keep using healing & creation magic. (I would be unsurprised to find out that someone has written a world like that already.)

6
The problem I've always had with Gray's magic is how he does damage to people by momentarily freezing people, and then breaking the ice he's encased them in. I mean, I can see how a giant ice hammer hitting you in the head might hurt, but why would I take damage from being frozen for a second or so?

8
I suppose that depends on how deep he freezes you; A few seconds encased in ice at 0C, but with your own tissue's temperature only brought down by contact with it, probably wouldn't be too bad. A few seconds in contact with ice at -80C? Try whole body frostbite.
For that matter, suppose the cooling effect doesn't stop at your skin? Instant hypothermia, you could be almost completely incapacitated, and even die without prompt care. Just a few degrees would be enough to render you unconscious.
Likewise, raising an opponent's body temperature a mere 5 degrees C would almost instantly incapacitate them, and very quickly lead to brain damage unless reversed.
Really, when you're playing around with magical heating and cooling, and not littering the area with corpses, you're looking at something just as selective as the MCSA. Something that's heating and cooling inanimate objects, but very carefully NOT heating or cooling living flesh.

Posted by: Brett Bellmore at November 09, 2015 04:09 PM (l55xw)

9
Thinking about it, in a world where magic is part of the physics, maybe most living organisms have homeostatic control over internal magical effects, which is fairly difficult to overcome? That would also explain the MCSA; Direct magical attacks mostly don't effect living tissue!

Posted by: Brett Bellmore at November 09, 2015 05:50 PM (l55xw)

10
Hmm. I always thought the simplest way to freeze something with magic would be to induce a sudden, massive increase in localized entropy, which by the laws of thermodynamics would result in an equally abrupt lowering of the localized temperature to maintain equilibrium.
The way I worked out involved opening a portal to the bottom of the deepest trench in the ocean, and letting some of the hyperpressurized water spray through it into the terrestrial environment. The sudden pressure release would make gases trapped in the water vaporize, and the abrupt absorption of heat energy to enable the gases' expansion would chill the area to near or below the freezing point of water, most likely freezing the water itself into ice, and probably anything else nearby.
Anyone with more scientific knowledge than me care to speculate if such an act, were it possible, would in fact cause the spray of ice that I envision? I'm certainly not a physicist, and have no idea if there is some gap in my understanding that would result in a different effect, like a disappointing stream of very cold but not actually freezing water.

Posted by: Tatterdemalian at November 09, 2015 10:56 PM (4njWT)

11
I think your thermal effects are going to be swamped massively (and literally) by the pressure difference your portal is dealing with. (All the following numbers are from The Internet, and therefore absolutely true.)

A typical fire hose is rated for 200-500 psi. You can use it for crowd control, pushing people around.

A typical water jet cutter is rated for 30,000-90,000 psi. You can use it to cut things out of steel plates.

The bottom of the Marianas Trench is about 16,000 psi...

You won't be so much "coating people in ice" as "making instant Soylent Green."

October 15, 2015

Nanoha Vivid -- anachronism

The anime runs up through about chapter 30 in the manga, but the manga goes a lot further than that, especially in raw. Chapter 69 has this image:

And it bothers me a lot. Explaining the situation would involve lots of huge spoilers, so I'll skip it. For the moment, leave it that the blonde chick with the sword is a brat living at a dojo for the "Fist of the Spring Sunlight" style of martial arts, which has been taught by Rio's family for generations. (It's also the main fighting style Rio has been trained in.) That sword belongs to Micayah, and it's a katana. Worse, it's also her magical device. The brat took the sword from Micayah's luggage without permission and has been playing with it while eating greasy food, and getting greasy fingerprints all over it. Micayah (in the foreground with her back to us) is not happy about this, and has challenged the brat.

What bothers me about the image is the brat's stance. That's French; it's a fencing stance. Fist of the Spring Sunlight is clearly intended to be taken by us to be an advanced form of Kung Fu, so where the hell did the brat learn French fighting style?

She didn't learn it well. When she does her lunge, her left hand should have dropped down almost to her leg.

Midchild is a real strange place; it's too much like Earth, or rather it's too much like Japan and China. The Wesley dojo is like something out of China, and the city Vivio lives in is like a clone of Tokyo, except with magic and high tech. It doesn't look alien enough. But except for the fact that all the magic devices speak English or German, it doesn't borrow hardly anything from Europe or the United States; it's all Far East. So what in hell is French fencing doing there?

2
My super-authoritative source (a few pages of a bing image search) couldn't find a stance like that for a Chinese sword style.

And it seems to be questionable technique, even for western fencing.

Blade at 45 degrees or so? It should be parallel to the ground, to slide between ribs.

Not only thrusting with a curved sword, but thrusting with one with no crossguard at all? Not even a typical katana's tsuba? When it does stop unexpectedly on your opponent's ribcage (or sternum, armor, shield, sword, whatever), you get to choose between dropping your sword or slicing your own fingers off.

Posted by: Mikeski at October 16, 2015 11:19 PM (TuMIP)

3
My overall reaction is that she's being shown as hopelessly incompetent with a sword, maybe just imitating movies. Her line "it's okay, I'm just playing; I'll put it back" reinforces this. In the last panel, it looks like she just discovered why you shouldn't swordfight in slippers.

4
She's definitely incompetent. Micayah disarms her and locks her, and then gives her a healthy swat on the rear end which makes her scream, causing Rio's cousin to come running. She chews out the brat and then apologizes abjectly to Micayah.

April 11, 2015

And that was the person in ancient Belka from whom Vivio was cloned, recognizably so because they both have exactly the same Heterochromia.

And that's the problem: heterochromia isn't heritable. It isn't caused by a gene. The most common cause of heterochromia is chimericism, which happens when two fertilized eggs merge and result in a single individual.

If you take a single cell from someone with heterochromia and clone it, the resulting baby's eyes will be the same color, one of the two the parent had. (Which one depends on where the cell came from.)

Not that it matters, except that it's a plot point in Nanoha Vivid -- or it will be. Einhart is going to recognize Vivio by her eyes.

Their cloning process is so awesome it even got the various chimerical parts back in the same places?

...something something "eye color" something something "linker core".

Posted by: Mikeski at April 11, 2015 03:37 PM (aLP9q)

2
I think there's more than one form of heterochromia. It can be due to chimericism, but the most common form in cats and dogs is heritable. It's quite common in white cats and in Australian shepherd dogs, for example, where chimericism is relatively rare.

3
Yup. My brother has two Aussie Shepherds, who have one blue and three brown eyes between them. The heterochromatic one was born with blue eyes, but only one darkened. She was what I had in mind for my "DNA" handwave, actually.

It makes my sister-in-law mad when I call that one "boat lights". (Vivio has real boat lights; red on the left and green on the right.)

6
Avatar, you mentioned previously that some of the information in this series comes from the drama cds or radio plays, IIRC. Are there translations or fansubs or at least summaries that you might be aware of?

March 11, 2015

I'm a big fan of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe stories. Just about the only mystery series (after Sherlock Holmes) I've ever really read much of.

For a long time I didn't have access to them, but when I got my Kindle it turned out that the entire canon was available for it, so I've bought and downloaded most of it, at least three quarters.

Recently I noticed something that's been bothering me -- more than it really should. In several of the stories, someone dies by being stabbed, and dies without making any sound.

That's not really possible. A stab wound can kill you fairy rapidly if it hits the heart, but you'll still scream. The classic knife-kill they teach soldiers is to get the victim from behind, to grab his head with one hand over the mouth, and to shove the knife in to hit the heart.

But that's not what happens in these stories. In at least one case the person was stabbed from the front, and she should have thrashed like a fish from the pain -- but didn't. In another case it's described as a woman walking by a man from his rear to his front, and sticking a knife in him in passing. Other people were nearby and would have heard if he'd made any kind of sound, including even falling on the floor, and they didn't.

1
There are a couple ways to do it if you need to stab someone and keep him quiet, but they basically involve either going for the throat or under an armpit and into the heart and lungs. Not a safe move either way.

Shock does take some people funny, though. So it could happen - but not every time, and surely not something you'd want to count on!

4
I'd agree with Avatar about shock: The same injury will drop one person instantly, and the next person will keep kicking for a minute or so. The difference is more psychological than physiological. Though, in the brain, they're hard to distinguish...

Posted by: Brett Bellmore at March 12, 2015 02:12 PM (L5yWw)

5
I've seen more than one story that had stabbing someone in the kidneys from behind because supposedly it's so painful you can't even cry out, but that doesn't seem likely. My assumption is both of these are some kind of urban legend.

Posted by: RickC at March 12, 2015 05:02 PM (0a7VZ)

6
Yeah, it can't be any worse than kidneystones, RickC... I've passed 13 of those, and believe me, you can cry out. Also moan, whimper, groan, cry like a little baby, pray for death, and so on.

7
Having talked shop about killing people, the theory I heard on silent knife kills is a slit throat from behind. But it can't be some neat little slice, it's got to be enough of a cut to open up the larynx and thus prevent vocalization. The killer has to be strong enough to not only make a very serious cut with one hand, the other arm has to be strong enough to hold the victim up, to prevent the body from dropping and making the kind of noise you'd expect when 150-200 lbs of meat drop to the ground.

The good news is you don't have to worry too much about shock, as they're going to die of blood loss very very quickly. But you do need to put them on the ground quietly.

And I expect everyone commenting on this post is now on an list... but then, most of us were on one already.

9
I suppose you could also gig somebody, severing the spinal cord high up, probably the neatest silent knife kill short of snapping the neck like Schwarzenegger did in Commando.
Ever since that movie, I've been unable to bring myself to go to a chiropractor...